“A Journalist’s Lifelong Search for Truth”

By Julie Mack

Thanks so much for having me today.

What I want to talk about today what I’ve learned about truth over my 40-some-year career as a journalist.

Truth is a very big deal for most journalists and that’s certainly true for me. That search for truth is what hooked me on journalism, and the specific event was the . I was 13 when that scandal started and I read everything I could about it. Of course, I was especially fascinated me was the story of how these two young reporters – and Carl Bernstein – were able to help uncover the truth that Nixon and his minions were trying to cover up.

So I started in journalist enthralled by these very idealist notions of searching for truth. And at that point, I saw truth in pretty simplistic terms – there was right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies.

Over the years, I had to come to grips with some hard lessons about truth. That’s truth is often complicated. It can be a matter of perspective. It can be elusive. It can be painful. And truth doesn’t always win; sometimes, the facts just don’t carry the day.

So here are the lessons I’ve learned about truth.

Lesson No. 1: Sometimes we simply don’t know the truth and we never will.

Truth is often murky

As a reporter, you learn this quickly – so many stories are he said vs. she said; someone makes an accusation and the alleged perp denies it.

Maybe it was a racist comment from a store clerk, an inappropriate remark by a teacher, an accusation of sexual harassment or assault. How could we confirm for sure what happened?

It’s actually easier today, thanks to the ubiquitousness of emails and texts, video and audio recordings. Think of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and all the other police-involved killings where the story initially offered by police fell apart when looking at the video evidence.

But there are still many, many times that we don’t know the truth. A classic example are some of the accusation of sexual misconduct levied against well-known people -- Brett Kavanaugh, Woody Allen, the rape accusation against Joe Biden last year.

The fact is that we don’t know what happened in those instances and so much time has passed, likely that remain mysteries forever. People may think they know. But it’s nothing more than an educated guess.

Lesson No. 2: Truth changes with time.

Here, I’m not talking about facts as much as accepted truths in terms of societal norms. I was born in 1959. That means I grew up in a world it was taken for granted by many that men were superior to women; homosexuality was deviant behavior; interracial marriage was a radical act; sex before marriage was immoral; if you were an atheist, you kept it to yourself.

All those norms have been upended since I was child.

As a journalist, I’ve learned its helpful to have that perspective – that the truths we embrace today may not be the truths endorse down the road; that what we see truth evolves over time.

Lesson No. 3: Truth reflects an individual’s lived experience.

Have any of you seen the movie Rashamon? It’s a 1950 Japanese movie in which various characters provide self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same incident.

As a journalist, it’s something I’ve seen often – people can have wildly different perspectives involving the truth of the matter even when the facts are not in dispute.

I’m thinking, for instance, of a story I reported several years ago in which a high school football coach routinely smacked his players in the locker room, like physically hit them enough to hurt. It was not in dispute. A parent heard about it and complained; an internal investigation was done; the coach admitted it, and there was a letter documenting the issue in the coach’s personnel file.

But the interpretation of those facts divided the school community. On one side were the parents and players who saw this an abusive coach who should be fired. On the other side – and this was the majority view in that community, btw – were those who thought that the issue was blown out of proportion.

That’s a pattern I’ve often encountered when reporting stories. The debate isn’t over the facts, but when what those facts mean, and people have very different reactions based on their own values and their own experiences.

I thought about this a lot during the Black Lives Matter unrest last summer. My take on racial injustice is that of an older white woman who tries to do the right thing but has never had to deal with this issue personally. That’s going to be a much different perspective that someone who is Black.

As a reporter, one of the most important aspects of my job is to try to gain insight into a range of perspectives, from Trump voters to people of color to people of a different generation or different parts of the state – really listen to what they have to say and think about their truths.

Lesson no. 4: Some things are beyond truth.

Yet another lesson I’ve had to learn over the years is that some things are simply beyond the question of true or false.

The best example here is religion. I grew up Catholic. I have parents who are deeply faithful Catholics – the kind of Catholics who go to daily mass and say the rosary. They would tell you that one of the central truths they hold dear is that Catholicism really is the one true faith.

I’m many devoutly religious people feel that way, and not just Catholics, but also evangelical Christians, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons. orthodox Jews. Muslims, There are many people who feel their religious path is the only path, but – obviously – they can’t all be right.

On the other hand, I can’t say they’re wrong either. Rather, this is about individual truths, and sometimes those are the most important kind. Lesson No. 5: The search for truth requires an open mind.

One of the most important skills that I’ve had to learn as a journalist is approaching things with an open mind and a healthy dose of skepticism. There’s an old saying among journalists: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

The goal, always, is to verify the facts and get at the truth as much as possible, and sometimes that truth is much more complicated or nuanced or different than I expected.

But no question, keeping that open mind can be really, really hard. Confirmation bias is a huge issue for all of us, including journalists.

A cautionary tale for all journalists – and all people, really – was the case of a now-infamous Rolling Stone story published in 2014 detailing the story of a University of Virginia student who said she was gang-raped at by seven people at fraternity party. The woman’s story was horrifying. She also totally made it up out of whole cloth, but somehow convinced an award-winning journalist and the editors at Rolling Stone that it was true.

So campus rape is a real thing. But in trying to illustrate that point, the reporter, Sabrina Erdeley, had a huge blind spot – she bought too hard into the idea that all alleged victims should be believed, and she failed to do some basic fact-checking to verify the woman’s story. It cost Ederley her journalism career and results in millions of dollars of libel lawsuit judgements against Ederley and Rolling Stone.

The takeaway from the Rolling Stone story controversy is the importance of being aware of your inner bias and not taking anything at face value.

Lesson No. 6: Truth can hurt.

And part of the risk of approaching things with an open mind is discovering unpleasant truths.

A person you admire is accused of wrongdoing or is caught in a lie. A policy you thought was a good idea turns out to be a dismal failure. New information is made public that casts a controversy in a totally new light.

One of the most difficult stories that I ever covered was the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at Michigan State University. You may remember that Nassar was a sports-medicine doctor who sexually abused hundreds of young female patients over a 25-year period. He got away with it for that long because the abuse involved digital penetration that he told the women was a very specialized treatment for sports-related injuries.

When it comes to truth there were two different groups of victims in that case. The first involved women who almost immediately recognized or suspected that this was abuse, although those who complained were ignored. Those women felt vindicated, even validated, by Nassar’s arrest.

But there also were patients who totally bought into the idea that this was a legit medical procedure and spent years as a Nassar patient undergoing this “treatment.” They were emotionally crushed by this – somebody they liked and trusted and admired turned out to be their sexual abuser, and the women had allowed this to happen.

As one woman said to me, it brought her whole sense of judgment into question. If this turned out to be so different than what she thought was happening all these years, what else was she wrong about?

It really showed me how learning the truth isn’t always liberating. Sometimes it’s devastating. Lesson No. 7: There are often multiple truths

In looking for truth, sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking there is a singular truth in a situation, when there are often multiple truths – and sometimes those truths are contradictory.

There are lots of cases where two things can do true at the same time.

It’s perfectly possible for someone like Harvey Weinstein to be a supporter of feminist causes and also a sexual harasser.For someone to support Donald Trump’s political agenda and oppose his lies about the election. To see Michael Jackson as an extraordinarily talented artist but also someone who likely sexually abused children.

A corollary to this lesson is that there are also partial truths – and, in fact, lots of what we see as disinformation actually has a kernel of truth in it, which is make makes it plausible.

For instance, I just wrote a story about COVID vaccine and the myth that it causes infertility. It does not, by the way. But it’s a myth that’s gained traction on social media because these new type of vaccines work by changing a protein in the body, which then generates an immune response. An anti-vaxer put out there that this change creates antibodies that attack a protein in the placenta, therefore resulting in infertility and miscarriages. None of that is true, but it can SOUND true.

Lesson No. 8: Power of denial

Sadly, facts don’t always win the day.

As a journalist, it was something I’ve seen all the time, and we’ve certainly seen that in a big way on the biggest stories of 2020 -- with the pandemic, the election and the Black Lives Matter movement.

There are people who think the election was stolen, , even though there is no evidence to support that. There are people who deny racial injustice exists, despite a multitude of examples to the contrary. COVID-19 has sickened millions of Americans and killed more than a half-million; yet there are Americans who still see it as a hoax or “fake news,” and an even larger number who think the pandemic has been seriously overblown.

And this sense of denial can have real consequences. We saw that with the Jan. 6 insurrection. We’re seeing it now in the pandemic – we now have a proven way to end this horrible crisis: Get vaccinated ASAP. Yet a significant number of people are resisting that.

One thing the past year has certainly underscored for me is the power of denial and the ability of people to rationalize positions that just make no sense on its face.

Which leads me to …

Lesson No. 9: Power of the narrative.

The various news events of the past year certainly has me thinking about how and why so many people seem allergic to fact these days, and my sense is a lot of this has to do with the power of narrative.

So I come back to this quote by Joan Didion: ““We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.’

So that’s what Joan Didion says, and I think she’s on to something. Narratives are how we make sense of the world, and it’s a device that we all use. It’s the lenses through which we filter the news.

The problem is that when we have wildly competing narratives, sometimes fueled by social media or news sources or political leaders that peddle disinformation or woefully incomplete information. Sometimes it’s just about having very, very different perspectives.

My son and I were talking about this yesterday in regards to Israel and Palestine. The Israelis and the Palestinians each have an elaborate narrative of what’s gone on in that region for the past 75 years or so and they are very, very different narratives. And if you were to examine those narratives closely, it’s not likely either side is lying – it’s more about cherry-picking facts to support their side of the story. It’s almost impossible to have any type of resolution because the narratives are so different.

And here’s part of me that fears that’s where we are now in America – that the political divisions are so deep and raw, the narratives are so different – that unity becomes, if not impossible, than very, very difficult.

It was 245 years ago this July that a committee of men led by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote some of the most enduring words in the English language: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those are powerful, powerful words. But even at time, what was held up as “self-evident” truths were pretty murky, right? It didn’t include women. It didn’t include Blacks or Native Americans. And we’re still arguing about what it means to have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

My point is that we were a country founded on certain core truths, but those truths are complicated. Two and a half centuries later, they are still in dispute.

So maybe it’s not surprising that my career started out 40 years ago as a search for truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. And now I’m about to retire realizing how difficult that is – that the truth comes in bits and pieces, and we each choose to figure how to fit those pieces together, what to emphasize, what to leave out, how to create a narrative that makes sense of things. And the narrative is going to vary – sometimes substantially – based on who is telling the story.

The challenge is getting to the complete truth, and I don’t know that I’ve ever achieved that, much to my despair and despite my best efforts.

And that’s the honest truth.